Article refrains from drawing conclusions, instead presenting the data. Android is doing better at moving users to newer versions, but the overwhelming majority of users don’t have the current Android OS version nor the previous version, combined.
Article refrains from drawing conclusions, instead presenting the data. Android is doing better at moving users to newer versions, but the overwhelming majority of users don’t have the current Android OS version nor the previous version, combined.
Yeah, not just worse quality but also some apps don’t come to Android until months later.
Linus from tech tips has complained that the Android version of YouTube is missing features that iOS has.
Another commenter mentioned that someone did a switch to Android challenge and Instagram was missing features.
A chatgpt competitor has had an app for iOS for months and Android just got it, I think something similar happened with chatgpt.
It’s not just arbitrary screen size, it’s about with wide variety of specs that need to be supported. Your app needs to work on a crappy modern Android with a slow cpu and limited ram as well as the flagship stuff, its easier for the devs to make a one size fits all app instead of expanding how some features only work on some phones and keep track of all that.
Additionally, newer versions of Android will have better and more capable apis. But if only 12% of people are on the latest version of Android, then coding the app to use those apis would either break the app on old version of Android or they would have to have code for doing a task an old I efficient way and a newer better way. So they just do it the I efficient way.
Man, this is only tangentially related, but I’ve slowly drifted away from the garbage app economy over the years, huh? That paragraph literally had me going “Oh, right, people use Instagram on their phones and stuff”, for different things like three or four times. No bearing to your point, but I will give myself some props.
Anyway, yeah, I’m not gonna stand here and say that iOS doesn’t make more sense as a starting point, both due to their hardware and software consolidation AND their US-centric nature that tends to make it a more profitable first stop (although that margin has narrowed) or that full legacy Android support isn’t more technically challenging. I think you’re overrepresenting the memory issue, though. You’d be hard pressed to find a dirt cheap Android phone with less than what? 4/6 Gigs of RAM? For mobile apps that will condition how fast things load and how many background apps get held before being flushed, but it’s not gonna be a massive challenge to make something run. And if it is, you should get that under control regardless.
About the rest of that list, I do think it’s interesting how half-remembered it is. For a while Instagram photos “just looked better” to the point of it becoming a meme, but that hasn’t been a thing on major Android phones for a couple of iterations, so it shouldn’t matter to anybody buying a new phone today even if you’re on Instagram (don’t be on Instagram). I don’t know about the “chatGPT” or “chatGPT competitors”. Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity have all been on Android for a while, not sure if it was all day one, but it was all certainly timely and available when I wanted to check it out. As for the LTT thing, I’m guessing from a google search, but was that about pop-up video being free on iPhone but part of the subscription on Android? Wasn’t that a regional thing? In any case it wasn’t a lack of support, it seems it was a guideline compliance thing. Not that I use the default Youtube app, but I’m guessing the Youtube guy wouldn’t point that out.
All of the minutia aside, I will say that as an Android user it’s been a long time since I went “wow, I wish that very useful app/feature/implementation” was available on my phone. I think the only things that came close to that were a couple of Apple Arcade exclusives I wish I could have purchased outright. It’s no question that there is an extra demand for coverage and support on Android, but at this point the market is large enough and the processes well understood enough that this is a development issue, not an end user issue. By and large, mobile apps you want and hear about are available right away and work just fine across devices.